


grab your wings (they're putting gravity on trial)

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Concussions, Eating Disorders, Feelings, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, M/M, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Roman Catholicism, Semi-graphic depictions of the aftermath of violence, but warning anyway., eating disorder more implied than explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 06:59:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6460369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story in which Matt thinks that he can escape the laws of physics and the human heart by detaching himself from anyone who's ever loved him -- but even Frank can see that he's come unmoored, and is aware that there's only so long a person can go without food or sleep and still stay alive. </p><p>Or: a story in which Matt gets a concussion and some french toast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	grab your wings (they're putting gravity on trial)

He’s tired. He’s the kind of tired that creeps into his bones, hollows out the marrow, and lives there. He’s got a split lip, a black eye, bruised ribs, and it’s par for the course, he doesn't remember a time when he didn’t hurt every time he breathed. He wonders if this just another habit he can’t quit, or if he’s actually doing some good.

He doesn’t know if he believes anymore —

or what it is that he’s supposed to be believing in.

 

In the days between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Christ descended into hell; in the middle ages, they called it the harrowing of hell, and Hell’s Kitchen feels more and more Medieval these days, invasion of barbarians and migration of peoples, all of it pockmarked with violence and oily smoke. That harrowed hell was not the hell of the damned, but something closer to limbo, a place of stillness and darkness. Matt’s half-dead, maybe more than half, and he’d be pretty sure that’s the kind of hell he’s in if not for the devil that keeps clawing up inside of him, filling his mouth with the sour copper of blood and the desire to scream. The pennies go on the eyes, after death, hold the lids down, but that doesn’t keep the taste out of his mouth. Maybe it’s good this way, he thinks. Maybe it’ll make him stronger, cleaner.

 

There are things that make him soft, make him weak. Silk sheets. Foggy. Karen. He keeps shoving people away, and when he shoves them away enough times, shoves them away hard enough, maybe they’ll stay away. If he hurts them, maybe they’ll stay away They’ve gotten under his skin, though his skin is mostly scar tissue at this point, hoping that if there’s nothing for them to hold on to they’ll just let go. But he’s gotten under their skin too, and he knows how to push them where it hurts. And maybe that’s why he keeps on fucking up everything he touches, because he’s gotten so good at breaking things. It’s just habit at this point. Maybe this is just what he is now. Six cups of coffee in the past hour and a half, his stomach roiling and sour, he says he’s done apologizing for what he is, who he is. He wants to be like Frank Castle, roaring and contemptuous on the stand,  but it’s just him and Foggy in the hallway. Matt’s not shouting, he’s just tired, but he still knows just where to push to make it all fall apart. He closes the door and sags against it, like the weight of his exhaustion and the two deadlocks can keep him from hearing Foggy shatter on the other side, maybe that’s Foggy shattering or maybe Matt’s projecting and what he hears is the crepitus of his own cracked ribs.

 

He puts his body between the things that creep in dark alleyways and the citizens in the rest of hell’s kitchen.  He tells himself that it’s because he moves faster when he’s lighter, that it’s determined by the physics equations involved in throwing his flesh and bones over the chasms between rooftops, that it’s a way of escaping the gravity that keeps hauling him down. It gets easier, as he spends less time with Foggy, and then no time at all. No obligation to explain bruises or dark circles under his eyes, no one to ask and therefore no one to lie to. He’s freer, lighter in so many ways. No more Thai takeout to eat for dinner with Foggy and Karen as they work through the night, no more mornings with strawberry-rhubarb cobblers balanced on bookshelves or afternoons with home-made empanadas in the kitchenette. He resents the way he wanted them, the way he still wants them, the warmth of a cup of take-out coffee in his hands, the press of a hand to his shoulder, desiring and hating his desire. He wakes up in sour sweat, shaking from the cold of sleep, hearing Foggy’s name from his phone. But there are never any calls, it’s just the tail end of a dream, leaves him wrung out and dry-mouthed. He wakes up dreaming Foggy’s name, dreaming Karen’s perfume, but it happens less and less, and he tells himself that soon enough he will stop dreaming them altogether. No more distractions, he tells himself. It’s much easier this way, he tells himself.  The trick is, when he’s tired enough, when he’s hungry enough, his focus narrows down to the simpler things, the will to fight and to survive. He eliminates the luxuries, he gets down to the essentials. No more Nelson and Murdock and no more laughter as night falls. No more Karen Page with coffees and breakfast and smiles. No more phone calls from Foggy to send straight to voicemail. Nothing to keep him from the rooftops, nothing to draw him back to the ground.

 

But there’s Castle. Castle, who chains him to a roof and looks at him like he might be something interesting, who bounces a bullet off Matt’s skull to make a point, and Matt is caught up in his orbit, a subtler kind of gravity that doesn’t pull him down but twists him sideways. Castle gives him choices, but they all end in death.  Castle pins him down and tells him about the things he can’t come back from, right before he throws him off the side of the ship; Matt comes up spitting blood with everything burning at his back and it’s not the first time he’s been baptized by fire and Hudson river water.  He staggers home, feels like he’s caught in that dizzy half-euphoria half-sick that comes between drunk and hungover, they say that being tired and being drunk are nearly the same, after a point, but he’s just drinking his own helplessness and that bottle’s bitter and never empty.

When he makes it back to his apartment, daylight is beginning to scratch at the edges of the horizon, and Matt strips off his armor, lays on the floor, and takes stock. He’s got Frank’s handprint bruised around his bicep, crushed through all the layers of his armor. He fits his hand to it, his hand smaller than the mark that Frank’s left. He closes his eyes, thinks about things you can’t come back from, thinks about hell. Thinks about death. Thinks about resurrection. He crawls into bed and pulls the silk up and over his head, like a winding-sheet, sleeps for five hours, the longest he has in weeks. When he wakes, he eats two protein bars and an apple, one sliver at a time.

 

***

Elektra’s dead ( _Elektra’s dead, oh god._ ) and there’s a ninja with a blade headed toward his carotids when he hears the punched-out sound of a sniper’s bullet meeting skull and soft brain matter. He guesses Castle’s on his side again, for now. Doing all the things that he says Matt can’t come back from, but people end up dead either way. People always end up dead.

 ***

When Frank said Red was just one bad day away from being him, he’d been sparring, digging for weak spots, but slid a blade through the ribs instead, the depth of the wound surprising them both. He knows now he’d laid bare a terror but not the truth. In truth they were dark reflections but not the same, because Daredevil would die before he took a life, or else the taking of it would kill him.  Frank knows that. He says _just once, maybe,_ and it’s ruinous even before he crosses himself like a reflex. Frank’s seen men with a death wish before, on and off the battlefield he knows that look ( _he’s seen that look in the mirror, just not lately_ )  and Matt’s not that, precisely. It’s more like he’s at the bottom of his own priorities list, he’d have to be to take a beating for that scumbag Grotto. He thinks Red’s a man who’s lost sight of the mission.

He sees Matt trying to kill off the part of him that is the best of him, burning his bridges, dismantling his rag-tag band of lawyers, trying to incinerate whatever’s between him and that nurse. Well, Frank never had to make that choice, that thing was taken from him, took a head shot when he did, and it’s the rest of him that pulled a Lazarus; left the other part in the grave with his family, where it belonged. Frank can be honest, because he’s got nothing to lose, because there’s no one that can get close enough to hurt him ever again. But Red’s going after the scraps of his own soul like a junkie in an alleyway on a bad trip and trying to rip his own throat out, cause he thinks that his blood is full of poison instead of the thing he needs to stay alive.

How much of it is because of Karen, he doesn’t know, knowing the way that she looked at Matt when he was just a blind lawyer to her, knowing that it would kill some part of her if he died too. And maybe this is some version of covering her body with his as glass breaks and bullets fly. But she thinks Red is worth giving a shit about, and Frank doesn’t doubt himself when it comes to who to kill and how to do it, but when it comes to picking out the goodness in people, she’s his compass because whatever he had is broken.

So Frank follows him sometimes, drinks out of his thermos of diner coffee and watches the devil save old ladies from low-level assholes, takes a balcony seat for a violent ballet that leaves would-be gangsters and rapists wrapped up and tenderized for the cops. It’s entertainment, at least. Sometimes he provides a little cover, sometimes he takes out the trash that the boy scout left behind.  

 

***

 

It’s months later when Matt’s on the rooftops, on the same side as Frank, both chasing after some assholes, trying to find the boss of a new drug operation in town. They’re selling heroin laced with fentanyl and something else that’ll give you the high of your life until it leaves you seizing and filling your lungs with blood and foam instead of air. It was probably the fact that they’re selling in the high schools, two fifteen-year olds in the ICU so far, that got Frank pissed off, but who really knows, with him. Frank’s somewhere behind him, beating the guy’s name out of the bastards that got left behind, and Matt’s tracking down the other two. He’s right on their heels when one of them throws a sonic grenade that bounces him off a brick wall. He tries to get up, goes right back down again. He can feel more than hear the footsteps as the goons keep running, keep getting away. Fuck.

Then Frank’s voice is there, telling him _stay down, Red_. Frank’s gonna take care of them and he’ll be back. And it’s easier for Matt to close his eyes, let the world spin without him, he shouldn’t let go but he doesn’t fight hard enough, and he lets his eyes close and lets the darkness take him.

When he comes to, he’s slung over Frank’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry, his face pressed into Frank’s shoulder. Frank’s got one hand on Matt, the other on his gun, and his breathing’s hardly gotten heavier, like Matt’s no burden at all, which makes Matt want to laugh, but just breathing makes his ribs protest, and laughing seems like too much work, just breathing is so much work.

 

Matt’s head is still spinning but he can tell from the particular scent of turmeric and cumin and coriander that they’re on his block. There’s a curry place on the corner with that precise balance of spice, a scent which drifts up through his open window on summer nights; even when he slams the window shut the smell haunts the place for hours. Which means that Frank knows where he lives. Of course Frank knows who he is, saw him without his mask on the rooftop where Elektra died.  Of course Frank knows what he’s thinking, too.

“Relax, Red, not interested in busting your secret identity. Your place is closer than where I’m crashing, and your brain’s taken  enough of a beating for the night. ”

“How long have you known,” Matt asks, half-mumbles into the side of Frank’s shoulder. It doesn’t _matter_ but Matt wants to know. Frank makes a little scornful noise in the back of his throat, and starts down the fire escape to Matt’s apartment.

“Since the hospital. I’m not a moron, Red.  I know your voice, the way you move. Don’t need to see your face to know you. But. I meant what I said, I don’t give a shit about your dress-up spandex game.”

 

Frank finds Matt’s first aid kit without much effort, which means he’s probably watched Matt before, though he couldn’t have been inside; Matt would know the scent of cordite and gun oil and diner coffee from down the hallway. Matt wants to tell him to fuck off, he can bandage himself up, but he’s having trouble sitting up, having trouble blocking out all the noises in the neighborhood, the edges of the furniture keep shifting as the echoes of that grenade keep bouncing off the vault of his skull, his downstairs neighbor is playing Adele into her headphones  on loop and it feels like he’s got a speaker cranked up next to his head about how _time's supposed to heal ya / but I ain't done much healing_ , but at least that’s blocking out the fact that he’s pretty sure she’s crying too.

 

Also, he’s pretty sure that _I can do it myself_ would sound more like a petulant five year old than anything else. _I don’t deserve your help_ would be worse.

 

Frank unclasps the helmet and pads his fingers along Matt’s scalp, searching for blood that can hide under dark hair. Frank’s not rough, but it’s the kind of careful he uses when cleaning his guns or wiring up another pipe bomb. Frank’s efficient in the way he moves, but when he’s not using his hands to check for blood or to spill more, he keeps them folded up into fists, like he’s forgotten what else to do with them, what else they could be for. Frank rocks back on his heels a little, hands folded up tight, and he’s looking at Matt in a way that makes Matt miss having the mask to hide behind.

 

Frank asks,

“When you get thrown in prison, when you end up bleeding out on the pavement somewhere, you think about how Foggy’s gonna feel, how Karen’s gonna feel? You still have people who give a shit about you.”  Which is what Frank cares about, really, is Karen, and Matt’s not ready for another fucking lecture, doesn’t need to be reminded of his failures because he _doesn’t forget them_.

 

“I told them to move on, they’re better off without me, and don’t give me that sentimental bullshit, Frank. You know better than that.” He doesn’t say _you know that Karen is a brightness and I am a thing that belongs in darkness or not at all._ The room keeps tilting dizzily on its axis, street noise seething up like irregular bursts of static, and Matt keeps focused on Frank’s heartbeat, steady and strong, the only constant thing that he can pick out of all the noise.

“You can _leave_ , Frank, I didn’t ask--”

“It’s not about what you _ask_ for, Red.”

 

Castle looks at him, tells him, “You’re not a supersoldier, you don’t have a magic hammer or a robot suit. You’re a human being, whether you like it or not.” Frank’s heartbeat is steady, never flickers, _truth_ , says Matt’s brain.  “She loves you, you asshole. Should see the way she looks at you, but blind or not you can’t see it, can you. Somebody fucked with your head real good, made you think that when you love a thing there must be something wrong with it. Made you like this,” he says, punctuates it with a press of the heel of his hand to Matt’s bruised ribs, and Matt has to grind his molars to bite down a ragged gasp of pain.

“Not gonna talk, altarboy, that’s okay. You want to take off your shirt or you want me to cut it off?” Matt grits his teeth again and pulls off the armor, strips off the shirt under it. Frank makes a little noise in the back of his throat, and his breathing shifts in a way that tells Matt that he’s a whole different kind of pissed off. And maybe Matt’s lost some weight, too much coffee and too many sleepless nights and not enough food.  And he’s burning the candle at both ends, that’s true, but it’s not Frank’s business, either way.  Frank’s pressing his hands against Matt’s ribs, palpating for fractures; there’s bruises blooming there, nothing broken but it’s going to hurt like hell for a while but that’s nothing new. It’s nothing Matt’s not used to, but he doesn’t think Frank would appreciate hearing that. There’s nothing broken, at least not in his ribcage, but he doesn’t tell Frank to stop.

He’s burnt his way down to scar tissue and whipcord muscle and bruised bones, and it’s still not Frank’s business. But Frank’s hands are pressed against the margins of his bones, as he breathes against the ache, and suddenly Matt feels the weight of it, all the focus of those eyes turned onto him instead of some other target, and he feels scorched raw beneath it.  The thing is, here, Frank’s a Catholic boy, too, and no matter what Matt says, he’s going to see straight through it, whatever armor Matt tries to wear. Like he saw through it in the hospital, saw past the pressed lines of his suit and tie, past the glasses and the cane straight to the teeth and claws. But that doesn’t mean Matt’s not going to try.

“Karen’s heartbeat ticks up when she’s around you.”

 

“Probably because I scare the hell out of her.” Matt shakes his head and the room spins.

 

“Not scared, scared is different, breathing is quicker and sweat smells different.”

 

“How do distraction tactics smell? Like bullshit? You look like hell, Red. And I would know.”

 

“I thought you didn’t give a shit about who I am under the mask.” And Matt knows that’s pretty weak, petty, and  Matt’s pretty sure that Frank wants to punch him, that he would if it weren’t wildly counterproductive.

 

“You think you deserve this, is that it? You think that you don’t deserve comfort, don’t deserve friends, and that what you deserve is to get punched in the face?”

 

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

 

“You think you get to decide what you do and don’t deserve? Nobody gets what they deserve in this world. You can pay someone by the hour for some psychobabble bullshit, but if you deserved punishment you wouldn’t need some slow motion self-destruction, cause I would’ve put a bullet in your head a long time ago.” Frank’s heartbeat is still steady.

 

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Frank.” And he meant it to be defiant, but he just sounds tired and lost. He can feel the weight of Frank’s stare on him, even as the rest of the room shifts dizzily away from him.

 

“Okay. Okay, you’re not in charge here any more. You’re going to lie here, I’m going to make something to eat. You can sleep or not, but if you try get up, I’ll put you down again and I’ll duct tape you to the couch. If you don’t eat, I’ll do that, and then I’ll call Karen, Foggy, and maybe that nurse lady from the hospital, and they’ll come, because they still give a shit about you whether you want them to or not. You got it?”

 

“Yeah.” Frank’s got a hand on Matt’s shoulder, pressing him down to the ground. Before he can move, Matt says, “Frank. _Frank_. I fuck up everything I touch.” His voice cracks a little, the words taste like ash in his mouth, but he spits them out anyway. Because Frank deserves a fair warning.

 

“Yeah, Red. So do I.” Frank pushes down a little harder, then stands. “I make a good breakfast, though.”

 

Matt hovers on the bleak edge of sleep and unconsciousness, thinks about what he deserves. All men alike deserve death; all that comes to them in the way of blessing is necessarily of grace. The teaching is that grace is sovereign: it cannot be earned all of Adam’s line are all marred by sin and no man _deserves_ grace. It is a _gift_ , given on the grounds of God’s unspeakable mercy. The sovereignty of grace results from its very gratuitousness: where none deserve it, it can be given only of the sovereign will of God — and this is necessarily inscrutable, but cannot be unjust.

 

It’s morning, and neither one of them is dead. Is this mercy?

 

Frank’s cooking something, there are noises in the kitchen, the whoosh of the gas burner flicking on, the crack of egg shells. Matt assumes he’s cracking the eggs one-handed, like a badass. He’s not sure what food he has in the apartment, except apparently eggs. Karen stopped by a few days ago, maybe it was a week, time’s been moving strangely lately; she put groceries in the fridge, he’s not sure what cause he hasn’t opened it since then. And maybe Frank kind of has a point. Matt maybe dozes off for a minute and when he wakes up Frank is back in the room with plates of something. Bread, eggs, cinnamon, vanilla— Matt owns vanilla extract, who knew?—French toast, he realizes, which means that an ex-marine vigilante just made him French toast, which is entering a new plane of absurd, one he didn’t know existed. But then it hits him and twists in his gut because, christ, it’s something that Frank must have made for his _kids_. He hasn’t earned this, how could he earn this. He could refuse but—that seems to him a deeper kind of sin, to refuse such a fragile mercy. So he eats. They eat together, silent, tenuous communion.

  
And Frank knows, like Matt knows, one plate of food and a new layer of bandages doesn’t fix shit, but that’s not the point. Frank’s got a guard-dog impulse, where he’ll tear out the throat of anything that comes at something he cares about. Matt knows it from  how often Frank’s put his body between Karen and the rest of the world, and how each time Karen’s walked out unbloodied with drywall in her hair, and Frank’s walked out with blood dripping from his hands. Matt doesn’t know what any of this means except that Frank doesn’t let go of anything without a hell of a fight, and he’s starting to think that the gravity that drew him toward Frank is a thing that drags on them both. Maybe he can make a truce with the laws of physics for a few hours, stay here in the balance between gravity and entropy. Frank’s in an armchair, Matt’s in a nest of blankets on the floor. Matt curls his knees to his chest, breathes, and listens to Frank’s heartbeat, slow and steady and true.

**Author's Note:**

> This last season made me sad and a bit angry, so much wasted potential; luckily both disappointment and anger are eco- friendly energy sources to power fic writing. This turned out darker and heavier on the Catholicism than I was aiming for, so, like. Sorry?
> 
> (Title from Synesthesia by Andrew McMahon)


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